Gorgeous East (55 page)

“You’re a poet, Evariste,” Szbeszdogy said, shrugging his shoulders. They were in the caserne at Aubagne, at the bar, splitting a carafe of mediocre red wine from the Legion vineyards at Puyloubier. “When will you believe me? Poets suffer at the hands of society, they are generally misunderstood. And they definitely do not fare well in the military. Look at Kleist, who shot himself in a fit of despair. Or the great Lermontov, who was murdered by the czar merely for writing the wrong kind of poems. At least you’re in good company.”

“Quit this little joke of yours or I’ll knock your teeth in,” Pinard growled. “I don’t even write!”

“You don’t have to write to be a poet,” Szbeszdogy continued, doggedly and at the risk of his teeth. “You can be a poet of things, of events, of gestures. You can even be a poet of the oboe.”

Pinard wasn’t listening. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Louise’s pale, beautiful face, which hung over the landscape of his soul like an enchanted moon. This was his life. There would be no other. He drained his glass, his eyes drifting to the window. Out there, in thin winter sunlight, the 2e section of the Musique Principale drilled along the parade ground at their usual solemn pace, followed by the Chorale du Légion. At a signal the drilling stopped, the instruments fell silent. Then, the tall, broad-chested Legionnaires of the chorale raised their voices in a song about war.

2.

S
mith and Louise de Noyer found themselves often in each other’s company in the weeks following his return to France. They were thrown together at official functions, which Louise attended with great reluctance, and only to honor her late husband’s memory. They were interviewed by the same journalists, appeared on the same news programs. They sat side by side all through the course of two or three long, memorial dinners.

At the last one, given as a benefit for military widows on a chilly spring evening on the lawn at Malmaison—former home of the Empress Josephine—somehow, during dessert (later, he wasn’t quite sure how he’d summoned the necessary guts) Smith reached under the table and put his hand on Louise’s knee. An anxious moment passed in which Louise did nothing; Smith began to sweat, his hand trembling where it lay. He couldn’t look at her—she might shove him away, slap his face. Instead, she took his hand gently and tucked it between her thighs and squeezed hard, and when she turned to him it was with a smile on her lips—half amused, half relieved. As if to say—well, at last! All this under the suspicious eye of Hervé Morin, Sarkozy’s new Minister of Defense, seated facing them.

On the way back to Paris, Smith and Louise pawed at each other in the rear compartment of the limousine, tugged at each other’s clothing. They fucked for the first time that night in her plush hotel room at the very plush Georges V and woke up late the next morning, having slept no more than ten or fifteen minutes, wrapped in each other’s arms, one inside the other, already deeply in love just as in Smith’s fantasy. They were perfectly matched, both intellectually and physically—so Louise asserted over an English-style breakfast delivered to the room at noon. Smith, nearly swooning, agreed and leaped across the small table to kiss her and they fell back into bed for the rest of the day and most of the night, exploring in detail the newly discovered territory of each other’s bodies.

But, in love or not, Smith was obliged to report back to Legion headquarters in Aubagne the following afternoon. Louise rode with him in a cab to the gare d’Austerlitz, nuzzling his neck, his ear, his collar wet with her tears. Oh, she didn’t want him to go! They had to be together! It was fate! Smith agreed. He would request a transfer to the Fort de Nogent, he said, and they would be able to see each other every weekend, but this change of address might take months, even years to go through—the Legion moved very slowly when it came to administrative matters of any kind. Louise couldn’t wait that long. She followed him down to Aubagne a week later and rented a furnished apartment near the base, just a few houses down from the regimental brothel, and they managed to see each other for an hour or two a couple of nights a week, Monday through Friday, half a day Saturday and all day Sunday.

In this apartment one Sunday evening after making love, they formulated the plan: Smith would claim his unclaimed passport from Poste Restante, 1e Arrondissement, Paris. The Legion was a military hell, a punishment he didn’t need anymore. He had been punished enough for poor Jessica’s death and for everything else. He would desert and Louise would come with him. They would go to the United States together and make a life for themselves, maybe in California; maybe Smith could apply to the M.A./Ph.D. program in dramaturgy at UCLA.

“I’m sick of France.” Louise sniffed. “Sarkozy is a terrible fascist, like a French George Bush. And everyone’s too tired to do anything about it, especially in Paris. But you can really accomplish things in America, in New York or L.A. You can be whatever you want to be. You’ve just got to try.”

“You can also be a bum,” Smith countered. “A homeless bum. Or murdered by hip-hop gangstas in your own apartment. Or shot in a drive-by—”

“Don’t be morbid, my sweet!” Louise said breathlessly. “Let’s think about this a minute—” The details solidifying in her head. “I’ve got plenty of money. There’s Phillipe’s estate. I’ll have to sell a few things—but not the château, not yet. Many years ago, he bought a tiny but important Pissarro, now worth at least a couple of million euros, and there’s an old Delahaye—it’s a famous French car, a very fine car—stashed away in one of our barns. It used to belong to his father—even in pieces worth two or three hundred thousand. I’ll get rid of those things first!”

Smith, giddy with possibility, leaned over and kissed her.

“You’re happy?”

“I don’t deserve all this happiness!”

“Oh, you do,
chéri
! You do!”

The thing was, he didn’t.

And the thought that he didn’t deserve any of it, not really, that he hadn’t yet paid his debt to the merciless Furies or to France nagged at Smith all through the next two months as Louise contacted lawyers, sold paintings and cases of rare vintage wine from the cellars of the château, assembled a substantial bankroll and wired it to her new account established at a Credit Lyonnais branch in Manhattan.

At last, all arrangements in place, plane tickets bought, passport retrieved from Poste Restante, Smith obtained a two-hour pass—ostensibly to do a couple of quick errands in Aubagne—and instead snuck aboard the local for Paris, where he changed out of his expertly creased Legion uniform in the cramped bathroom of the café car. During a twenty-minute stop at Chalons, he tied it all into a bundle—the sacred kepi blanc, the stiff, spotless shirt, the neatly ironed trousers, and Ranger boots—and threw the bundle into a nearby canal, sticking around long enough to watch it sink to the bottom. And he disembarked in nondescript civilian clothes six hours later two stops short of the capital, at the Aeroport Charles de Gaulle.

3.

A
major international airport is like a medium-sized city in microcosm—without permanent residents but with a city’s worth of people coming and going. There are shopping districts, bookstores, cafés, better and worse neighborhoods, out-of-the-way corners. The underlit extremity of CDG Terminal 2, Spur 6, the Air Martinique Terminal, currently under renovation, with many of its fluorescents knocked out by an electrical glitch and its storefronts and departure gates closed with yellow tape, was the perfect place for a rendezvous of conspirators.

Louise found Smith there, slumped furtively over a glass of red wine at one of the three concourse tables at a small restaurant called Chez l’Auvergnat. The strong scent of the rich, aged cheeses of the Auvergne region curled out of the glass counters inside to assault the nostrils. Just now, Smith felt nervous, queasy—a sensation made worse by the stink of the cheese. It seemed what he was about to do—his desertion—had its own rancid smell, something the bomb-sniffing dogs at the security gates would surely be able to identify. He could see it now: He would be sniffed out before he boarded the plane for New York, cut from the crowds of tourists like an errant sheep and chased down the concourse by a pack of braying hounds.

Across the narrow spur just beyond some electrical scaffolding, an arched window, half covered with plastic sheeting, overlooked the tarmac. The blue and white Air Martinique Airbus liners, absolutely massive machines, were parked out there along the spokes of the wheel beneath a lowering sky. A dark line above the horizon in the distance indicated approaching rain. A Legionnaire caught trying to desert was subject to a variety of terrible punishments—beginning with beatings and solitary confinement in
le trou
and ending with a six months’ stay in that frozen prison camp in the Jura Mountains. Louise took Smith’s hand and put it between her thighs and held it tightly there for a moment—a potent reference to their first night together.

“
Mon amour
,” she murmured. “Are you ready?”

Smith looked up from his wine with some reluctance. It was impossible to think clearly when confronted with those large, wonderful indigo eyes. She looked beautiful today wearing a simple, expensive pale blue dress, delicate blue jade hoops in her ears, her skin glowing like pearls beneath a black light, as if her blood and viscera were slightly radioactive.

“What’s wrong?” She flinched beneath his scrutiny. “Something’s wrong!”

“No, nothing,” Smith said and finished his wine in two swallows and signaled to the waiter. “Just let me pay the bill—”

“I know you’re nervous,” Louise said, as Smith put the last of his heavy euro coins onto the waiter’s tray. “But your passport is valid. Yes, the visa stamp isn’t current, but you’re going home, back to the United States. Why would they—”

“Stop it, Louise!” Smith interrupted sharply. Then, more gently, “Please. I’ve been thinking about all that for days. I’ve considered all the angles, I even talked to someone at the American Embassy. We’ll be all right. Let’s go, let’s just get it over with.”

Louise bit her lip. She looked a little hurt. “Kiss me first,” she said. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Smith sighed, and he kissed her and they shouldered their carry-ons and passed from Chez l’Auvergnat’s pungent, shadowy corner into brighter neighborhoods—a post office, boutiques selling Hermès ties and Montblanc pens, restaurants specializing in seafood nearly as good as some in Paris—and from there into the elevators as big as railway cars that descended to the security checkpoints below.

4.

T
housands of passengers stood waiting to go through the metal detectors to the gleaming spurs and the departure gates where the planes were being fueled and cleaned for transatlantic flights. The lines snaked around, six deep, between strap-and-pole barriers, the whole area patrolled by tough-looking soldiers with bomb-sniffing dogs.

Smith watched as a team of three soldiers and two dogs came up between the barriers, the claws of the dogs—big Belgian shepherds—clicking against the hard floor of polished aggregate. They nosed along the ground, panting and sniffing at the bags and at the shoes of the wary travelers. Smith recognized the soldiers’ identifying shoulder patch—these men had been detached for airport security duty from the 1e Montagnard, Armée de Terre—a mountain regiment based in Haute-Savoie, with whom Smith’s training section had once participated in a twenty-four-hour joint maneuver back during Basic. They wore the Armée de Terre black beret with the mountain-peak patch of their regiment on the right side, and carried the ubiquitous FAMAS 5.56 slung over the left shoulder. Smith felt himself sweating profusely as they passed. What if one of them recognized him? But they didn’t stop, their dogs trained to sniff out plastic and dynamite, not deserting Legionnaires with anxious hearts.

“Once we’re at the gate, we’ll get a drink in the first-class lounge,” Louise whispered. “Who would ever suspect a Legionnaire of flying first class?”

Smith didn’t say anything.

“It’s too bad they got rid of the Concorde,” Louise continued after a moment, just to make conversation. “We’d be in New York in under three hours . . .” Her voice trailed off. She was beginning to catch some of the nervousness evaporating with the sweat off Smith’s skin. The metal detectors looming far ahead seemed an impossible goal, the gates to heaven.

We’ll never make it. Smith peered into the distance, shading his eyes from the fluorescent glare. The dogs will get me first. In the seconds following this disturbing thought, one of the Belgian shepherds began to bark two rows over and Smith held his breath. But the dogs had found a woman wearing a colorful headscarf—probably a Gypsy or maybe Turkish—and were now snarling at the large, black vinyl bag at her feet and pointing to it with their snouts. The soldiers of the 1e Montagnard drew around the woman menacingly; she stepped away from the bag, terrified, and put her hands on her head. One of the soldiers unzipped the bag and rummaged around and after a few perilous seconds withdrew a large salami. He gestured with it crudely and the others laughed. Then, to the disappointment of the dogs, he zipped the salami back into the bag and tossed it back to the woman. Shaken by the ordeal, she burst into tears. The soldiers moved on.

“
Oh, c’est affreux!
” Louise said, shaking her head. “Poor woman. You would call that racial profiling in the United States!”

Smith shrugged, distracted by the crowds, the loud humming of the fluorescent overheads. He had a headache. The line inched forward.

“Those planes were tearing up the sky . . . ,” he muttered, distracted, as they came up to the X-ray machine, as they lay their bags on the conveyer belt. He was talking about the Concorde, a subject that hadn’t been mentioned for at least ten minutes. “Something about making a hole in the ozone layer . . .”

Louise looked at him, puzzled. “What’s that,
chéri
?”

“Never mind.”

Their carry-ons rolled into the maw of the machine, then Smith and Louise took off their shoes, their belts. Louise removed her jade and silver hoops and a heavy-looking platinum bracelet and placed it all in a plastic bowl provided for that purpose. Smith unstrapped his watch apprehensively—it had a military-style black web band and a black face with glow-in-the-dark numbers, distinctly of the type issued to the Legion. He went through the metal detector first; Louise followed. More soldiers of the 1e Montagnard waited on the other side.